I complained a couple years ago when all afternoon they were running some completely inane story about trump staff having problems finding light switches in the whitehouse and repeating it multiple times during the day.

Political coverage I can take and I doubt I liked trump any more than the reporters at NPR do, but that's just factionalism. I find it really problematic[1]. If there isn't anything relevant to report on, music (or dinosaurs) would do fine.

But I'm not a cute kid, so I didn't get a response. :D

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-peZ7IeD2w

NPR has a very formulaic editorial/programming approach. They pick a topic and grind it for a month. Personally, I can’t listen to them for more than a week before getting bored.

Trump made that worse everywhere, of course.

> having problems finding light switches

On the other hand, all's good in the world when that's the problem requiring national attention!

That's the thing. There almost definitely were much more important things happening around the world, yet they talked about that. Most news organizations do the same thing, which is part of why people call them biased.

I too find light switches in large and unfamiliar houses to be confusing. Of all the things Trump could be criticized for, I agree that this one is not fair.

Kudos to the parents for encouraging / helping that behavior too. Too many people grow up believing it's useless to interact with the world at large because they can't affect it.

I rarely listen to the news now. I swear that I hear “Democrat” or “Republican” within the first few words whenever I turn on the radio to hear NPR. It drives me crazy.

Same here, their bias used to be in the form of leaving out a point of view, or bringing on a moron to represent a point of view as a punching bag. Or the opposing view was presented by someone slightly to the left vs someone on the far left. For the last four years it has been a reflection of fox news. I miss the old subtly biased npr.

I gave up NPR for podcasts a long time ago. There is so much high quality content for different niches now. I wonder if others have made the same switch.

Never got as far as their podcasts. I have given up on their news though — just feels really partisan and stale (and I’m saying that as someone who leans left)

Lots of new people entering political discussions over the past five years, it was the best drama in town. It was likely fantastic for readership, but I suspect everyone will move on now that politics will be boring again. As it should be.

Politics ain't gonna be boring again for a while yet, though I can understand why you might push that narrative. Trump was a mere symptom of political dysfunction that includes both parties. Until our government can actually address the needs of its people we're going to continue swapping back and forth between the two parties.

Eh, I wasn't pushing a narrative. I'm not even from America, so I have no horses in this race. It's just not comically dysfunctional anymore, and back to being real politics. The politics may be controversial still but it's hopefully just policy, not subterfuge, scandals and insurrections. I guess we'll see though!

"Real politics" would involve considerably more aggressive movement from the democrats to shut out the republicans for 2022. I see the republicans gaining the house a the current trajectory, with nothing more than a one-time, means-tested, under-delivering $2000 check, let alone more aggressive policy on the horizon to address economic crisis.

In the first year it was comically dysfunctional. Then it was concerning. Then it was deeply, deeply sad to watch as an outsider.

It did make me realise that some people think the U.S. has the greatest health care system in the world though. That took some time to process.

I think that's part of the problem in getting a proper health care system. Some think they will lose what they have, rather than gain quite a lot, in the switch to a modern public health care system.

Planet Money does some amazing stuff though.

Buying a few barrels of oil and tracking them from ground to fuel tank and making T-shirts starting from cotton and ending up as a final product are really good journalism.

Then they have the episodes where they try to sell a bunch of christmas trees, you can skip those :D

What I do like about NPR stuff is that they edit their podcasts, I just can't handle a 3 hour meandering chitchat flowing in and out of different subjects.

When I was a kid, Watergate was the lead story on the news every single day for well over a year.

I grew to really hate hearing about Watergate, Watergate, Watergate, blah blah blah.

I imagine kids today are similarly sick of politics today.

Or, slightly more globally speaking, Covid-19.

Well, they are sick.

In the UK we have a rather unimaginative news diet of Covid-19, Brexit, lol-Trump, repeat ad nauseam.

One day our media will have to discover doing proper journalism - I think it will be quite a shock when the news stops writing itself. It's been like this for roughly five years (or 50, depending on how much wine I've drunk.)

I was feeling that I wasn't as informed as I used to be about world affairs compared to the old days of reading the newspapers, mainly because of how UK news are now focused on promoting UK/US news. The stories are there, on the guardian, the times, etc., but it's hard to find them. Whether it's the algos, or that screen space is harder to balance coverage, or whether it was easier to skip to the back in newspapers to read the world news, I'm not sure.

So I've been trying Al Jazeera as an additional source, and I have to say, it's good. I feel it's fairly unbiased, a bit left leaning, the writing quality is high, the occasional piece that's not is because it is written by a foreign, local, journalist that offers real local insight on an issue (e.g. they had a Tunisian journalist writing about the anniversary).

Give it a go.

I agree, Al Jazeera is worth a watch, DW News (German) and France 24 are also alternate source of what's happening elsewhere - all English language, BBC is another alternative.

> One day our media will have to discover doing proper journalism

You say this as the guardian are breaking a bunch of constitution-shaking-ly tough stories on the monarchy? https://davidallengreen.com/2021/02/the-queens-consent-a-str...

Also what do you expect? COVID-19 is ongoing and is still killing as near as makes no difference 1000 thousand people a day in this country, Brexit has effectively just become "real", Trump is in a major trial. It's in the news because that is what the news currently consists of...

> It's been like this for roughly five years (or 50, depending on how much wine I've drunk.)

Rosé-tinted spectacles.

"Proper journalism" is vacuous at best and a dog-whistle at worst - since you refer to 50 years ago the term "Shabby Journalism" with regard to watergate should ring a bell.

In the age of the internet, no one needs to suffer when podcasts, Youtube, Audible, Spotify, etc exist.

In the age of helicopter parents zealously micromanaging kids' screentime, there are still a lot of kids who functionally aren't in the age of the Internet.

Helicopter parenting aside, those kids are probably better off for it, too.